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Epic Meal Time

Combine the average person's weekly food supply with enough booze to ensure sloppiness for an entire weekend. Congratulations, you just created what Epic Meal Time would call a "light snack."

Just The Facts

Epic Meal Time is a wildly popular YouTube cooking show that debuted in late 2010.

The concept is, basically, a group of drunk twenty-somethings create full-course meals with as much meat, sugar, and alcohol as they can get their grubby little paws on.

They have managed to craft meals valued at upwards of 100,000 calories using ordinary kitchen supplies and an utter inability to see reason.

Nobody on the planet loves anything as much as these guys love bacon.

Contrary to the first impression of every viewer, the Epic Meal Time guys are not American but are in fact ENTIRELY Canadian.

We think it's bullshit, too.

Stomach Rumblings: A Beginning

The Internet has given literally everyone a pedestal in this day and age. No matter how divergent, how depraved, or how utterly mad your worldview is, you will gain an audience. Your insane mind-drool will be seen and bolstered by somebody, somewhere. We've yet to decide whether or not that's a comforting thought.

The most beautiful, disgusting, and obscene example of the Internet's true power is Epic Meal Time.

You would eat something this man gave you. You don't have to say it aloud. We know.

It started, as most meal-dares tend to, with fast food. That perfectly well-adjusted gentleman up there, a 25-year old substitue teacher named Harley Morenstein, was tasked with eating three Wendy's Baconators at once. This glorious event was filmed, thus giving way to the first proper episode of what would become an Internet sensation.

That first video, innocently enough, featured Morenstein and a few friends creating a "fast food pizza" with KFC chicken, french fries, whatever the hell is in a Taco Bell Crunchwrap Supreme, and other choice ingredients. Cracked knows a little about turning simple pizza into existential horror, so this was still entirely relatable.

The meal itself featured 286 grams of fat and was itself 5,210 calories, a little over twice the average daily caloric intake of one person. Little did anybody know, these figures would soon be considered paltry.

This is what the source of ten-thousand bypass surgeries looks like.

As the Arteries Clog

Now, there is still nothing too spectacular here. Hell, chances are that 90% of you reading this have yourselves participated in or have filmed eating challenges in this vein. You have also, in all likelihood, come to regret your choice of friends, but we're not here to judge. Nothing that Harley or his friends were doing was out of the ordinary.

That is, until these beautiful Canadian bastards lost their goddamn minds.

After Harley enlisted a larger group of people to help with the fun, the cooking escapades got exponentially more ridiculous. Meals became elaborate, sloppy monuments to excess. Jack Daniels became a pastry sauce and bacon grease became a beverage. If there was a problem that couldn't be solved by the application of bacon, the solution became a fistful of brown sugar and more bacon. No type or variety or cut of dead animal was excluded, as seen when they deep-fried a little horse meat for the fuck of it.

Eventually, the group began to stave off boredom by combining Legos and the heartiest drunken spirit they could muster. That led to the creation of a scale-model building made of hunks of the once-living. For Christmas.

Canadian Santa Claus is so much more generous. And made of gravy, probably.

These Canucks truly threw caution to the wind every Tuesday and literally did not give a single fuck what anyone thought of them. The first few videos seemed normal enough, with Harley's epic boasting becoming yet another reason to tune into the madness. However, as time wound on and the meals kept getting more intense, our gracious host could not keep up without a little help. At a certain point, you begin to realize that he's drunk off his ass the entire time.

Remember that there is a lot of prep that goes with these Epic Meals. Meaning knives. Lots and lots and lots of knives. And this guy:

Kicking Sensibility in the Meatsack: A Survey

To truly get the effect of what these brave drunks can accomplish, you have to do away with the Gladiator-style soundtrack, the quick-cuts and Harley's next-level shit-talking (where he repeatedly asks the unseen masses how knowledgable they are about subjects such as cooking, dying, and the female anatomy). You have to see their unholy work by itself.

WARNING: THIS NEXT SECTION IS FUCKING GROSS. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

The boys of Epic Meal Time go hard. Everytime. Hard is never not in their vocabulary. Diamonds look up to these men and wonder how they hell nature could be so cruel. How in the fuck else could anyone ever hope to create the following?

For Thanksgiving (which they celebrated only because it's pretty much Meat Christmas), they took the TurDuckEn concept to its most fucked-up extreme and created a five-bird baconstrosity...which was then shoved, whole, inside the carcass of a pig.

Assume that we're not just spouting out hyperbole here. It'll make this whole thing go a whole lot smoother.

On chili night, they stared deep into the Ark of the Alcohol Covenant when they introduced Four Loko into the mix. Because, really, what chili is complete without a night of bloody diarrhea and a starter gooch-tattoo?

Innovation: replacing all utensils with the flesh of the dead.

In a rather counterintuitive move, the boys visited a gym recently...where, instead of lifting weights, they built a gigantic energy bar with bacon and enough chocolate to fuel the hopes of every fatass in North America.

Somewhere, a tubby kid is crying gravy-tears right now. A dream is coming true.

The Players

Half of the fun of the series is not the meals themselves, or bearing witness to the beginning of a mass case of ketone poisoning. No, the wonder of the videos comes when you get to watch the cooks, in a moment of slovenly glory, devour their meals. There are only three things off-limits while eating: utensils (except for paddles), dignity (no exceptions), and holding back (because what are you, a bitch?).

The Epic Meal Time crew is itself just a regular group of guys that have regular day jobs and a complete lack of fuck-giving. A fan favorite in the crew, besides Harley, is a man known by day as Alex Perrault: Canadian Personal Trainer. But by night...he transforms...into Muscles Glasses.

Body by Beef/Bacon/Tequila/Lard/Horse

As well, several attractive, anonymous females come along and devour these culinary deathfeasts from time to time. You know what, let's just cut straight to the demonstration sha--

Your pants sure came off fast, guy.

What Lies Ahead (Is Covered in Bacon Vodka)

Epic Meal Time can still be seen on the below-linked YouTube channel, with new videos coming out every Tuesday. The group is also currently pitching an idea for a weekly cooking show on network television. As cool as it sounds, the guys might actually bring about a foodpocalypse when given a television audience and an actual substantial budge.

The group has been nominated for a Shorty Award, for excellence in the food aspect of social media (which they have undoubtedly popularized), winning their category. Oh dear God, it's almost painful to imagine what they will build now.

In closing, it would do us all well to remember each video's closing words, from one Mr. Harley "Drunkbeard" Morenstein:

--well, okay, he doesn't close out the videos in that way. Instead, he insists that next time, we're going even further down the chasm. Next time, we'll eat an abstract concept such as time, or something as ungodly inedible as the lady bits of a certain reality show "star."

That's not the real point, though (thank fucking God). The real point is in the subtext: Harley and his friends are telling us something profound here. They're saying that, it's okay to go that extra mile. It's okay to give 110%, to not give a single dick-warming fuck who gets hurt or whose pants you might be wearing after this whole thing is done. He's telling you, "don't give in...don't be afraid...go for it."

Because in the end, it's not really about what you've done. It's what you know.